Religion and Theology

The Virgin Mary, the mother of God remains to have a noteworthy role in the history of Christianity, whether it was from the perspective of the Catholic or the Protestant faith. The critical issue considered when it came to the discussion about Mary was not about her significance.  Instead, it was in the debate about the veneration and honor that was due to her, in accordance to the will of God.  There was the question as to how Mary should be perceived in accordance to what the Holy Scripture required.  It was already established that Gods self-revelation could occur through historical studies.  In the development of the studies of Christology, scholarship evolved and included an exploration of the historical life of Mary, which could be done in the same location and period as of Christ.

The Canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John placed Mary in the same locations where Jesus was from the time of his birth and at different points of his ministry on Earth. Through a historical construction of the life of Mary, many Christians were able to relate to her, not as a heavenly creature, but as a persona whom they could share their lives with in their Earthly struggle.   The discoveries about the life that Mary led, as highlighted by the context of the traditional Jewish culture she experienced, a historical analysis of the life of Mary guided understanding of Christian faith and praxis, which could be described as contextual theologies. 

First Century Rabinnic Tradition
This section will discuss about the culture that Jewish women were exposed to in the first century of Rabbinic tradition. There was limited certainty as to the life of Jewish women in the time that Mary was born in.  There was little known about Jewish women preceding the emergence of Christianity, as few ancient sources were preserved.  Thus, the surviving sources failed to provide the necessary elements to present a full biography of a single Jewish woman in the time of Mary, during the Greco-Roman antiquity. It was important to piece together different chunks of what was known about the social, economic and religious life of women during that time.

Geographical Setting
Galilee could be located in the northern part of the ancient land of Israel, wherein it was the distinct region Judea in the south.  It had hilly ranges that surround that land that could be described like stripes that went from East to West.

Nazareth was a village that Christian theologians focus much interest in.  It was located in southern Galilee. Archeological remains revealed farming as the main occupation. This showed that inhabitants of Nazareth were either peasants who worked the land, tenant farmers or craft persons. There was also no wealth that were uncovered in this village, as there were no public paved roads, no decorative mosaics, nor any luxury items.  It seemed like a small village of no special importance, except for the fact that Jesus grew up there.  Furthermore, Mary, his mother, spent most of her life in this village as well.

Since Galilee was a multilingual society, different languages were used Latin was the native tongue of the Romans, Greek was the language used by the educated and ruling classes, Hebrew was the ancient language of the Bible by which the Torah scrolls were read, the every day and ordinary language was Aramaic. Jesus, like Mary spoke Aramaic with a Galilean accent.  In an instance in the book of Matthew, Peter was recognized to be a Galilean because of his accent.  Mary also resided in a village wherein the inhabitants had fair-hair, blue eyes and svelte figure with Semitic features, according to the depiction of Western art. Biblical scholars also found Mary to have a strong body that was shaped by the routines of hard daily labors.

Socioeconomic Setting
Women, like most men, ordinarily received little formal education despite the traditional image of Jewish men to be highly educated.  Social status was still placed a critical role when it came to the determination as to how much formal education a Jew received and what sort. There were still fewer women than men that were educated to learn letters.

The rite of passage for majority of women in antiquity became an adult, in the sociological and physiological sense, when they had heterosexual intercourse and children.  For women who were considered free, like Mary, this meant the woman would enter into a socially validated arrangement.  Mary experienced being betrothed, as a part of a common social custom during that time.  However, while most people entered into licit marriage through a public declaration of the matrimonial agreement, they also practiced signing pre-nuptial contracts called the ketubbah.

In relation to marital customs, there was also a formal divorce document that was available for Jews in this period, as proven by several papyrus artifacts of this document that survived.  It was harder to assess the differences in circumstances for Jewish women that were enslaved.  Mary was not a slave and it would be irrelevant to analyze further how social customs applied to enslaved Jewish women.

Most Jewish women during that time either married or not, would enter into an active sexual and reproductive life at a young age, from 12 to 18 years old.  Most of their marriages would be with older men.  Thus, women who would not experience death at a young age, usually due to child birth, could experience being widowed and would enter into other marriages. Nevertheless, families commonly arranged first marriages.  While women negotiated subsequent marriages, especially when their fathers were already dead.

Jews and Gentiles alike placed a heavy cultural, as well as economic value on virginity for women entering into their first marriages.  Fathers paid close attention to preserving their daughters virginity.  Virgin daughters were often closely guarded.

Most of the time, marriage contracts specified virginity as a requirement, thus if a woman was found to be a non-virgin by her husband upon their first marital contact, the marriage contract could be nullified.  This would highlight the grace of God upon Mary and Josephs union. In the absence of the dream and the revelation to Joseph of the plans of God with Mary and her unborn child, Jesus, he had the right to nullify his engagement with Mary.  Since newly-wed men could divorce their wives based on non-virginity, Joseph who was just engaged with Mary during that time could certainly get out of any marital agreement.

The basic chronology of Jesus life would reveal how they have witnessed and experienced the destruction of villages and the enslavement of its inhabitants during the time of Herod and even after his death. While this was not recorded in history, there were indications that as young as 15 or 16 years old, Mary was a married woman with a young child. Mary had to face the depredations of the rampaging Roman legions and experienced direct or indirect terrors from such destructions. Since the so-called holy family had little to begin with, Mary became no stranger to violence and social disruption. Since Mary occupied the lower rung of societys social ladder, Marys life was lived in an economically poor and oppressed, peasant Jewish culture.

Religious Life of Jewish Women
Similar to non-Jewish women, they were confined by a patriarchal culture to the domestic realm.  They were often secluded at home and wore veils when they were seen in public. Menstrual impurity excluded women from participating in the activities of the synagogue.  Furthermore, they could not inherit or initiate divorce proceedings, and they were betrothed with men that were chosen by their fathers at puberty, with little regard to their own desires.  There was also no evidence that showed that women were allowed to be disciples of Rabbis and travel with them, before the time of Jesus.  Thus, this made Jesus relationship with women to be radical given the restrictive context for women during that time.

The life, teachings and ministry of Jesus were saturated with Jewish customs and beliefs that could not be comprehended apart from understanding Judaism.  This was reason to believe that Mary and her husband ran an observant household, which meant the years of their lives were filled with daily prayer, weekly Sabbath observance and occasional festival pilgrimages in the Temple of Jerusalem.  It could be concluded that Mary of Nazareth lived and died as a faithful Jew.  The last mention of Mary in the New Testament revealed her praying with the disciples as they assembled after Jesus death in the Book of Acts. 

Marys virgin birth was viewed to be important part in the construction of the life of Jesus and his ministry. Despite the fact that Mary lived at a time wherein society was structured to be patriarchal in nature, being the mother of Jesus attributed an important role to women in her time, which could be perceived as a critical role in the religious sector of society.   Nevertheless, Marys faith was shaped by Jewish belief and trusted the God of Israel when she gave herself to the will of God, when she had borne the child Jesus. The early church of Christianity that developed years after the death of Christ did not shape it.  Thus, her faith was molded in the cusp between the two world religions.

Rabbinic Tradition as it Relates to Mary
A review of social context that Mary experienced showed that female virginity was both praised by male ecclesial authorities.  In the case of Mary, she was model virgin because it symbolized purity and a sinless life.  A virginal lifestyle was honored as holy, yet women during that time commonly practiced this within their households. However, Christian writers still attributed to Mary the honor of being a model virgin. Catholic writers praised her for redeeming the sin of the disobedient Eve through her obedient virginity (Irenaeus of Lyons) and for achieving the state of original purity that was intended for men (Ambrose of Milan).  Mary had become the model of obedient virgin, who was submissive to the divine.  Non-canonical texts such as, History of the Blessed Virgin and The Miracles of Mary pointed towards the perpetual virginity of Mary through miraculous proofs that supported it. 

This context provided an important implication when it came to the conflict that Joseph experienced, upon discovering that Mary was pregnant with a child, when they have yet to have marital relations.  Since virginity was often a requirement for when it came to marriage contracts, Marys pregnancy represented a violation of this agreement based on human logical reason. It was because of the divine revelation of the purpose of Marys immaculate conception of Jesus that Joseph submitted to the will of God.

Virginity was the symbol of receptivity it signified the integrity of her spirit and her absorption of God when she surrendered to His will. Thus, in her cooperation with grace, she experienced grace after grace.  As the socioeonomic and political environment of her time presented, it seemed that the grace of God was needed in order to survive the different struggles she faced in her life.  The lowliness of Marys circumstances, from being poor, being pregnant while still a virgin and everything else that was going on in the sociopolitical background of her time connoted affliction and oppression.  Despite this, she was able to exult God with joy in her spirit.  She represented the nature of God and how he was to those who suffer from humiliation and hunger.

As a first-century Jewish woman of faith who responded full-heartedly to the Spirit, Mary is a friend of God and prophet who belongs in this company of grace. In no way does this placement among the friends of God and prophets diminish her unique historic vocation to be the mother of the Messiah or the specific grace that accompanies this vocation. It remains true, however, that a womans maternal function does not exhaust her identity as a person before God. While honoring her unique relationship with Jesus, therefore, relating to Mary as truly our sister within the communion of saints refocuses her significance for the church today in terms of her whole graced life lived before God.